GURPS Alternate Dungeon Fantasy
I don't intend to force this on the Westmarch players, but these are some vague thoughts for an alternate take on Dungeon Fantasy. Add Monster Hunters: Champions and Powers: Divine Favor to the list of allowed books. Revised Templates Cleric Reduce IQ, Perception, and Will by 1. Remove Power Investiture 3, the optional Power Investiture 4 and 5, and the 25 points in Holy Abilities from the Advantages list. Reduce all IQ, Perception, and Will based skills by 1. Remove all 20 points in Spells. Add Divine Favor 9 and 20 points in Learned Prayers as a mandatory advantage to the Advantages list. Add Divine Favor 10 or up to another 20 points in Learned Prayers to the Advantages list. Wizard Remove Magery 3 and the optional Magery 4, 5, or 6 from the Advantages list. Remove Hidden Lore and Alchemy from the Primary Skills list. Remove all 30 points in Spells. Add Ritual Path Magery 2 as a mandatory advantage to the Advantages list. Add Alchemy to the Background skill list. Spend 50 points on Ritual Magic Path skills, Thaumatology, or in TBD "fire and forget" spells. "Fire and Forget spells" can also be bought as Advantages, as well as Ritual Path Magery 3, 4, 5, or 6. ;Magery and "Fire and Forget Spells" A wizard may know one or more spells as "Fire and Forget". These can be bought as Alternate Abilities to his Ritual Path Magery, in which case he can only cast on spell at a time, and its effects end as soon as he casts a new ritual. More powerful or experienced wizards may know multiple "Fire and Forget" spells that can be used at the same time and that don't end when he casts a ritual. All "Fire and Forget Spells" have the Magic Spell modifier (-25%) (Magic Power -10%; Accessibility: Must have arms, hands, and mouth free to cast 15%). Each spell may be bought as an alternate ability of the wizard's Ritual Path Magic, or an independent ability, or an alternate ability of an independent ability. Templates Needing Revision Bards Just drop the crappy magic spells and let them use bard-song abilities? Druids I like my druids as shape-changers with minor magical abilities, but neither Divine Favor nor Ritual Path Magic is the right approach here. Summoners ;Demonologists :Give them Path of Spirit, Path of Crossroads, Path of Magic and call it a day? ;Elementalists :Give them Path of Energy, Path of Matter, Path of Spirit, Path of Magic? Just get rid of them? ;Necromancers :Path of Undead, Path of Magic ;Shaman :Track down Phil Masters and thump him one. :Alternately, grab a bunch of Crusader powers or something? Comments The basic concept here is to get rid of GURPS Magic as much as possible. Divine Favor versus Ritual Path Magic gives a sharp difference between Clerics and Wizards. Issues I think the big change is reliability versus scope. Standard DF spellcasters are very reliable: they can do 20-30 different things, most of which are small and specific, but they do them very reliably and consistently. Divine Favor reverses that for Clerics: their abilities are random and unreliable, but they can do just about anything if they get lucky enough. Wizards are in an even worse spot. With low skill levels, Wizards have to specialize in what kind of magic they'll perform. They have a fair amount of flexibility at that level, but powerful effects need to be prepared in advance via charms. Toting grimoires around is pretty useful for wizards, letting them recreate spent charms while the delving band has downtime. But still, I'm worried that wizards would be useless under these rules - they'll certainly feel much more like 1st or 2nd level AD&D wizards than proper GURPS wizards. Obviously, I don't know what to do with Summoners. Making them highly specialized casters is the easiest, and works well for Demonologists and Necromancers. Shamans and Elementalists already have problems under the normal templates, and these rules don't help them. I don't know what to do with Druids, either. They're the weakest of the DF: Adventurers spellcasters normally (worse even than Bards, boo-hiss!). Shapechanging might help, but the kind of Earth Elemental one can change into on 70 or so points is not that impressive. So I just dunno. See Also Talents for Ritual Path Magic